Heavy reader, thought BWP was the worst movie I ever saw (managing to oust long-standing champion The Good Son).
A question and an anecdote:
Question: What was the relation between the three? Film students (if so, what, same class?), journalists, friends, what?
Anecdote: A former co-worker of mine went with some friends to see it. They thought the film was real. As they stood in line, they saw a poster with a sign taped to it. The text of the sign? “After the film, meet the filmmakers.” :smack:
Daniel, you and your friends should add at least one more category - people who have gone hiking. Some of the things that really bothered me about the movie. Take a map that covers the whole are you are walking. Don’t hike onto your map. They were idiots for only having a partial map. If you don’t have a frame of reference when you walk (like the stream), you are going to walk in circles. That seems to be just one of those odd quirks of people, we don’t walk straight lines without a reference. When you are lost, line up landmarks, then walk to those landmarks. I think I was taught that as a Cub Scout. If you can’t see things that go bump in the night, turn off the flashlight. Without a flashlight in my experience it is much easier to see at night.
Rather than expend any mental energy on what might be out to get those fools, I spent most of the movie thinking of easy ways to get out of the mess they are in. And there were many things that they could have done differently. It’s not that I am too accustomed to movies or TV shows putting images in my head. It’s much more that I expect a filmmaker to put forth at least the tiniest bit of effort to get me to suspend my disbelief.
I rented it.
My sister thought it was stupid. I wasn’t scared-however, I did enjoy it and find it VERY intriguing. The fact that you couldn’t see what was scaring them, that you had to use your imagination, all that.
The scariest thing is the unknown, that sort of thing.
I just think that it was something different, and a pretty neat little film. I like legends, and ghost stories and curses from the past, so it was right up my alley.
Daniel, I’m probably up there with Jonathan Chance in the heavy reading stakes, and, as I say, I didn’t find the film scary, and I didn’t like it very much. Is this data any help?
If they knew to do them, which they didn’t. They were unprepared for real hiking and should never have gone into even unhaunted woods, but it’s not particularly improbable that they would anyway.
“The Blair Witch Project” was one of the scariest movies I’ve seen. I have nightmares like that: something is very wrong, but I don’t know what it is, or how to escape it. If the filmmakers had explained the Bad Stuff or shown us the Monster, it would have been much less frightening. What you don’t see is always creepier than what you do see.
Robb, I go hiking and camping, and it was pretty believable to me that inexperienced hikers would make stupid mistakes like that.
I’m a very heavy reader and a horror film fanatic and I HATED BWP! It was lousy and it made me sea sick!
I’m with Little Nemo right down the line. I understand that there are terrifically dumb people in the world, but you’d have to be terrifically dumb to actually think that the movie was real. It never even occurred to me, before, during, or after watching the movie, that anybody was actually giving any credence to the idea that the events shown in the film might have actually happened. I certainly don’t think the film relies on the audience believing it happened to be scary.
It was one of the scariest things I saw that year. It had me freaked out walking through my front yard to get into my house the night after I saw it. That last sequence, when they’re running through the house, with the handprints, and the guy in the corner… Jumpin’ Jehosofat, that was scary.
I saw it in the theatre, soon after it came out. I didn’t think it was a true story. I hadn’t (still haven’t) seen the website. I read more than anyone I know except my parents.
A huge part of the overall effect was the word-of-mouth hype used to promote the movie. People would be hired to go to clubs and stuff and spread rumors about the movie as if it were a real deal. There was a “documentary” on FX (?) about the historical Blair Witch that was made to look pretty credible. The website was cryptic.
So, here you get bits and pieces of lost “history”, and sketchy rumors about a tape.
And by the time you get to see the movie, even though you know it probably isn’t real, the promotional stuff has already built up a strong base for really caring what happens to the people on the tape. I think without that base, the movie is just pointless and confusing. But as it was, I was fully freaked out.
BTW, the website is still up: http://www.blairwitch.com/
Oh my, how I hated this movie. I was pissed from halfway through, when I realized I’d been taken for $7 for NOTHING, all the way through the end. And please. “Didn’t know if it was real or not?” Come on, common sense should inform anyone that if anything like that happened, it would NOT end up in your local theater. If anything, it would go straight to a gov’t laboratory.
The Blair Witch Project was one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. The Ring is the only other movie I’ve seen that rivals it.
I really don’t understand why people make a big deal about the map and the river. It was obvious to me that the characters in the movie were under the influence of the supernatural. It wouldn’t have mattered if they’d had GPS equipment, a trail of breadcrumbs, compasses and sextant. They’d still be lost. Why? Because the reason they were lost is not because they were completely incompetant, but because they were under the influence of the supernatural. A strange, subtle, inevitable influence drawing them to their doom.
shudder
PS- I’ve been a very avid reader from the age of five–a total of 27 years.
And I am very imaginative. It wasn’t the lack of visual demons/monsters that didn’t scare me, it was the lack of visual cues from the actors, and no, snot running down your nose and stringing onto your hand wasn’t cue enough, nor was all the screaming and hollering. Those people weren’t terrified, they were very obviously affecting terror. They were simply bad actors dealing with dimwitted characters.
In my opinion, this movie would have easily scared the bejesus out of any middle school student, but grown ups…ah…well, to each his own. It’s silly to suggest that someone lacks imagination because they didn’t enjoy it as much or at all.
I didn’t really get that scared, though I did get a pretty good bump at the very end, with the house and the corner standing and the handprints. I was annoyed by the whining and stupidity of the characters, and did want to see them die.
However, I liked the movie. I liked the concept enough to enjoy it despite the flaws. I didn’t think it was the scariest thing since the Exorcist, though, and I really don’t have a very high opinion on the Excorcist.
I had the advantage, however, of seeing it before a lot of the hype had started, and when I saw it, they also showed another documentary very similar to “The Curse of the Blair Witch” before it, so I already had the backstory filled in that the movie itself kind of lacked. I can see how, without that context, most people wouldn’t really know what was going on.
I think had I gone there expecting this really super-dooper scary movie, I would’ve been pretty dissapointed. However, since this was at a film festival, I was expecting gay cowboys eating pudding, and was pleasantly suprised.
Oh, and I read a lot.
I remember hearing that the original concept for the film was to be a faux-documentary about the (equally faux) Blair Witch legend. The bit about the disappearing college students and the recovered footage was intended to be just a part of the documentary, but the filmmakers liked the idea enough that they decided to make a whole movie that way. The footage they’d already prepared was made into the documentary shown on television (I saw it on Sci-Fi). It was pretty good; I was impressed by both the invented history of the Blair Witch and the way they managed to fake film stock, photos, etc. from different time periods.
You do realize that this movie had virtually no script and the actors didn’t always know what was going on. To get the scared reactions out of them the directors actually went out there in the middle of the night and scared the shit out of them.
Lol, is that like the opposite of a hoopy frood?
I spent most of the movie with my eyes closed…because it gave me motion sickness to actually watch it. Waste of my time and money.
They were supposed to be 3 film students attending Montgomery College in Rockville, MD. There’s a picture of the three of them on the Rockville campus at the website
The problem is that Montgomery College doesn’t have a film program.:smack: :wally
I was not in the least bit scared.
Pissed off at Heather, 'cause she was acting like a bitch who thought that only she had the answers to everything.
But not scared.
I read all the time and am very easily scared. Blair Witch did nothing for me. In fact, my first thought on leaving was thang God I didn’t spend $5 on this. (My friend treated myself and her mom to a matinee)
Read lots, knew it wasn’t real, didn’t like it, wasn’t scared.
As I was watching it, I was thinking that there were plenty of things that could have been really scary (the night scenes, the ending in the house, etc.), had there been a director around to, you know, direct them.
True, and it’s an interesting technique that can be used very effectively sometimes. Used too much, however, the results can be very uneven, as I think they were in this case. In Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead the head of the theatre troupe tells about how one of his actors was sentenced to die for some crime and the troupe was allowed to make it part of the show, thinking it would make for an incredible performance. Instead, it bombed: the actor’s own emotion was so strong that he wasn’t able to show it to the audience. The same thing happened here, I think: the actors were all so scared that they weren’t putting any effort into their acting. No matter how scared they were, it just wasn’t that scary to sit in a theater and watch them run around screaming.
As for the characters’ behavior and the witch: I could have believed that the witch was causing them to get lost and behave irrationally if there had been any sign at the beginning of the film that they weren’t already bunch of prickly idiots to start off with and that a change had actually come over them in the woods. Again, having the director there with them would have helped. As it was, they came off as a gang of morons at the beginning of the film, so that any further impairment caused by the witch would have turned them into a buch of screeching baboons who couldn’t even wipe their own noses, and… uh… wait a minute…